Starfleet Command Volume II: Empires at War

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Too much ambition can almost spoil the best of intentions.

By IGN Staff

Last fall's Starfleet Command was a deep and rewarding space combat game. Considered a classic by many, it ultimately landed a few yards shy of greatness. SFC1 was based on the enduring and beloved pen and paper boardgame, Starfleet Battles ¿ itself renowned for grand scale complexity. Unfortunately, significant gameplay imbalances and numerous performance bugs marred its initial release. A series of patches were subsequently released that resolved most problems, however. Through positive word of mouth Starfleet Command achieved a cult following and ultimately enjoyed respectable sales. Now, barely a year later, Interplay is back, hoping to build upon their success with Starfleet Command Volume II: Empires at War.

Starfleet Command Volume II places gamers into the role of starship captain set in the universe of the original Star Trek series. All six races of SFC1 return and are augmented by two more, the Mirak and the Interstellar Concordium. Both combine to introduce over 100 new ships to the fray. In total there are now over 1,300 variations of starships, fighters, base stations and planets ¿ of which about 600 are playable. The interface and AI have been improved and each race now gets carriers and fighters. Multiple single player campaigns are available for each empire as well as a highly configurable quick combat simulator, referred to as the "Skirmish mode." Multiplayer options abound, such as head-to-head or cooperative over LAN and the Internet; MPlayer and GameSpy provide Internet matching.

Before jumping into the meat of this review it is necessary to point out that the current release version of SFC2 is rife with technical problems. The readme file actually warns of random crash bugs and suggests saving often. Since its mid-December debut two patches have been released which have corrected several issues, but many more remain. Additionally, both the box and the manual purport the availability of a persistent, multiplayer universe ¿ however, a last minute business relationship with the hosting service, Flipside, dissolved, causing a significant delay; Interplay is now apparently stepping up to host the servers. The online community has been hounding Interplay and developer Taldren on their Web site forums. To their credit numerous programmers, writers and testers, including Taldren CEO Eric Bethke, have been very prominent on these boards, promising strong and ongoing support of the game. Other companies would have simply shut down the boards and ignored the negative sentiments. Indeed, the most recent patch was posted just hours before Taldren was to depart for their Christmas break. Hats off! This is the sort of concern and respect for community that many other companies could learn from.

SFC1 was a remarkable visual achievement over a year ago, but pales in comparison to the currently modified engine. Ships bank and turn with greater grace and generally react like the hulking behemoths that they are. Dynamic lighting and damage textures have been added in Volume II and the results are often spectacular to behold. Phasers and Photon torpedoes cast colorful arcs onto the hulls of each ship and explosions are better than ever. As ships take damage huge gouts of vapor escape the hulls, forming a trail in their wake, while textures alter to reflect the pounding of weapons; though these textures are arbitrary in their placement and do not show actual strike points. The 3D models are tightly drawn, with no seaming or texture slippage noted. Overall the tactical combat engine is beautiful and worth every penny of admission.

Audio is very well done but can be spotty in places. The background music is generally quite rich and on par with a full symphony orchestra. Yet, the soundtracks for each race are a bit hard to distinguish and are not as distinct as those in SFC1. A wonderful addition to the combat engine is that of crew voices for each of the ship stations. A hull breach will result in excited messages about mounting casualties while a successful hit and run raids are reported by a gritty commando voice-over. I was hoping for more variety in the messages themselves, but after extended play the balance seems about right. Each race employs different voice actors, the quality of which range from very effective, in the case of the Klingons, to the cartoonish, particularly with the Mirak whose crews all sound sickly and could probably use a good spoon of Robitussin.

Game play remains focused on the excellent ship-to-ship tactical engine, as debuted in the original. SFC2 is still a real time combat system, but the pace of play on the single player side may be adjusted during gameplay via hot keys. It is possible to pause the game and issue orders, though firing solutions may not be plotted. Multiplayer games require setting the speed at the beginning of a mission and may not be changed during. The interface still consists of tiny icons, but has been tweaked to good success; energy management may now be prioritized, fleet controls are refined and hit and run raids automatically drop shields at the proper moment. The mouse is employed to control all facets of the game, but hotkeys are critical to long-term success. The engine, ships and weapons are a bit more balanced than previous; missiles have been downplayed somewhat to balance the game out somewhat and tractor beams are not used with reckless abandon by the CPU. Overall the interface is very responsive ¿ though the color and art styles of some empires make options difficult to discern at times.

Combat still revolves around a constant juggling of resources. Maintaining a tenuous distribution of energy to shields, weapons and thrust is at the absolute core of the game. Deciding whether to turn on anti-missile defenses or increase shield strength or employ electronic warfare is every bit as important and punching holes in the enemies' hull and deploying marines. More battles are lost because of poor logistical management than simply because you were outgunned.

AI has also been improved in SFC2. Enemy ships will turn to present you with their best shields and weapons are often fired in staggered fashion ¿ often varying between medium to short range. Moreover, it is apparent that the AI is playing by the same rules as the humans, as I have not observed any CPU opponent seeming to exceed the listed specifications of a given ship class. There are three levels of difficulty: Captain, Commodore and Admiral. At the Admiral level expect the CPU to hit you with fists, elbows and an occasional knee to the groin. The CPU is also very adept at monitoring your weapon status and is apt to unleash a ripple of missiles just after you've fired off your final bank of phasers. Expect to see some rather effective escape and evade tactics too. The community sentiment expressed within the Taldren forums has been largely positive regarding the overall effectiveness of the AI ¿ and they are a rabid bunch that should know!

A primary complaint levied against SFC1 was that the single player campaign was dull and uninspired; many of the missions involved repetitive convoy escorts and chance encounters wherein the enemy almost always seemed to be evenly matched with whatever ship you possessed. Interplay has touted that the Dynaverse II campaign engine would remedy this, promising a rich economic simulation with a greater diversity of missions. Unfortunately, they fall well short of on that score.

You begin by choosing a race and enlisting as a young captain in that empire's navy. A series of static images broadly paints the state of the universe and decrees that your role is to seek out the enemy and protect your empire ¿ how and why is never really made clear. You are provided a handful of prestige points and a small frigate class vessel that is placed proximate to your homeworld. A hex-based map, several times larger than that of the SFC1, conveys political borders and displays ships in the quadrants immediately adjacent to your own. However, the interface is so clumsy and cumbersome that viewing, moving and zooming the map is an exercise in futility. Only after moving to another sector will potential missions appear. As the Dynaverse plays out in real-time it is not uncommon for missions to disappear out from under you while you are thinking about them. Several missions into the campaign the engine begins to bog down and movement between sectors may last upwards of several minutes at a time. Upon mission completion a debriefing screen tallies your results, but provides no real insight as to your performance; Describing which shields took the most damage or which weapons were more effective would have aided in predicting future engagements ¿ this is, after all, a strategy game. Scripted missions are injected to add spice and convey a larger storyline, but the goals for these can often be vague.

Additionally, there is no interaction with your empire's central command or with any of the other ships in your vicinity, unless they happen to be present when you begin a mission; even then the communication options are next to nil. Sadly, there is no diplomacy model, yet the interface conveys that certain races are allied with you at the beginning of the campaign ¿ so what? It was widely hoped that Dynaverse II would portray a realistic production model based upon the number of occupied quadrants, worlds and starbases in a given empire. The expectation was that every ship on the map would originate at a planet or starbase and spread out from there, you might assume that all encounters would be based on actual fleet compliments rather than based on randomly generated factors. But you would assume wrong.

I don't mean to belabor the point, but serving up a multi-opponent campaign, with hundreds of ships and an underlying economic model, has been done before with great success ¿ the original Master of Orion, for example, and that shipped on 5 floppy disks! Surely the algorithms for this are available somewhere. Fortunately, about a dozen text files, bearing nearly every possible Dynaverse variable, including ship costs, prestige allotments, racial alignments and supplies costs, is located within the SFC2 install directory. These are easily edited in notepad and tons of reference information exists within the many fan sites and the Taldren forums.

Strangely, there are several valuable items from SFC1 that have been omitted. For no apparent reason the crewmember interface is gone, yet officer names appear at every station in the combat engine ¿ the manual even refers to legendary helmsmen and engineers as a tactical benefit. This was a huge role-playing aspect in SFC1 and its absence is perplexing; this is a particularly hot topic on the Taldren boards, as might be expected. There are no tutorials for any of the races other than Federation ¿ despite the fact that each race had several previously, including several cool final exams! There is also but a single Skirmish type, while several were present in the original. What gives?

Multiplayer, as was mentioned earlier, is a mixed bag. MPlayer provides matching, but their interface is just as lousy as ever and finding an opponent can be hit and miss. GameSpy Arcade is also supporting SFC2, but there were no players present any of the dozen or so times that I tried to match up over the holidays. When Interplay gets their Dynaverse II servers up and running the massively multiplayer premise should be sufficient to provide a satisfying experience for many ¿ but this is Interplay's first big foray into hosting persistent world servers and consumers should expect problems initially (see: Everquest and Ultima Online).

The manual is no longer spiral bound, it has been mentioned that this was a mix up at the publishers and not an intentional oversight. Most concepts are lightly covered but some good attempts were made in the appendices to express strategies and tactics for each race. Additionally, the online fan base for Starfleet Command is deep and vocal. There are dozens of fan sites that convey tips and hints ¿ some of which are voluminous. Over 45,000 postings exist on the Taldren forums, with more than 1,000 new ones added each day. Opinions are decidedly mixed at this juncture but the prevailing attitude is that patience and faith will reward.

Starfleet Command Volume II is a very ambitious product; this is overly apparent at times and might be part of the problem. The campaign engine is in dire need of an overhaul or at least some serious improvement. Yet, the fundamental tactical combat engine is excellent and the hundreds of ship types and the multitude of weapon combinations should serve to provide literally hundreds of hours of enjoyment for any strategy fan. Several future patches have been promised by Taldren and their past history suggests that they will stand by this game. You have to respect a company who is willing to take a public beating by hosting public forums in their company/development site. So despite the current technical problems, the noted oversights and omissions as well as the lack of a promised massively multiplayer environment there is still much to recommend. At some point future Starfleet Command Volume II may actually cross that threshold of greatness for which it shows so much promise.

7.5PresentationThe manual is simple and clear, even providing tactical hints and strategies. However, the manual is not spiral bound, unlike SFC1. Fully configurable keyboard commands.

8.5GraphicsSpectacular at close range, but can be a bit dark otherwise. Dynamic lighting and damage textures were added to an already stunning game engine.

8SoundExcellent crew voices have been added to each race that really helps to discern what is going on during a heated battle. Soundtrack is not as distinct as in SFC1.

7.5GameplaySFC2 is a very complex game for new customers but provides a rewarding experience with the proper time investment.

9Lasting AppealPresuming that upcoming patches can fix most problems the future is bright. Over 600 playable ships, 8 races and lots of single player and multiplayer options will keep this going for months.